A decidedly automotive theme this week – it’s going to drive you wild.

GM USES THE WEB TO REBUILD CONFIDENCE

General Motors have had an extremely challenging period, with sales dropping steadily to the point where it was forced to undergo a Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructure, and was essentially only saved from going under by the US Government.

This move was extremely controversial, as it was seen (quite correctly) as a “socialising” of the auto industry, and it presents GM with a whole raft of challenges. Along with with obvious challenge of selling enough cars to stay afloat and repositioning themselves as environmentally aware (the image above is their new hyper-efficient car) ,they have the incredibly difficult PR task of rebuilding confidence in their brand, and selling the idea that the government was correct in bailing them out, and that despite this bailout out they are operating as an independent entity.

They’re calling their campaign to do this GM Re-invention. The TVC is pretty much as you’d expect right down to the shots of stampeding horses, moon landings and touchdowns, but the website is far more forward looking.  The site really seeks to be a conversation between the company and it’s customers, shareholders, and a sceptical public.

The key features include “Ask Fritz”, which lets users put questions to GM’s CEO directly; live chats with the heads of various departments, of which transcripts are available, and well maintained Twitter , Facebook and Flickr pages.

It’s an ambitious approach, and one that would have to be well monitored, given the amount of negative sentiment surrounding the company at present. But it seems to be quite successful – Business Week’s assessment can be found here, showing that consumers have generally reacted positively.

Awesome app that is actually useful

It’s pretty normal to come across an iPhone app that’s entertaining for 24 hours. It’s somewhat rarer to come across one so useful that it will be ubiquitous. But Mini USA’s new auto assistance app is just that. Basically, it allows one button connect to roadside assistance services, specifying the kind of trouble your in. As well, it uses the phone’s navigational devices to tell the assistance service your exact location.

It’s so useful that it could genuinely be described as having the potential to influence a purchaser’s decision when they’re buying a car.

Help Me, Rhonda

Rhonda is a cool new tool for designers and animators. It was developed about 5 years ago, but until now has only been used in museums and galleries. Basically, it allows you to flip images onto different planes, using 2d line drawings to make 3D shapes. It’s in beta testing now, but will be in the market soon. I’m not sure why they chose Neil Young’s mournful 1972 classic “Out on the Weekend” to soundtrack the demo, though?

The Venus Project is an organization that proposes a feasible plan of action for social change, one that works towards a peaceful and sustainable global civilization.

If you are ready for a new world order, and fancy living in the Kibbutz of the future, this is ‘the’ place for you!

Now That’s What I Call Digital Advertising

I thought I’d start this week with a few examples where companies got their digital advertising right. When you’re exposed, like I am, to a lot of web campaigns, it’s easy to become a bit blase and not see the forest for the trees.  But these, for differing reasons, stood out.

First up, Toyota have partnered with EA and produced a virtual version of the Prius for Sims 3.  While this kind of integration has been happening in the movies for time immemorial, it’s less common in the world of video games. The Sims is the perfect starting point as, as well as being the most successful PC game ever, 50% of its audience is female, very unusual in a market dominated by young males. A simple, clever idea, hitting the Prius’s demographic right on the head.

Another thing we often work on are online competitions, and the mantra we repeat  when doing so is keep it simple, make it interesting, make it easy and make the prize memorable. The World’s Cutest Dog Competition ticks every box – simple, easy mechanic, everyone dog owner thinks theirs is the cutest, a million dollars worth of prizes. Tick, tick, tick – and the result is a huge number of entries and unbelievable exposure for the sponsor. And on a completely different tip, but great for the same reason, is  Canadian beer Okanagan Spring’s Sponsor Me Spring. Visitors to sponsormespring.ca could appeal, through video, to Okanagan Spring to sponsor their small-scale or backyard social gatherings. This saw the sponsor of events as salubrious as Hanging Around After Ed’s Soccer Game. It generated some some really funny content – definitely a site worth browsing for a while. The promotion obviously really speaks to the beer’s target market.

But if you’re not going to go with simple, make it memorable. Wrigley’s France have launched this fantastic augmented reality competition to promote 5gum, where you mix a track and create a visual, upload it. A few similar things have popped up lately, including one to promote Eminem’s “The Release”‘s UK launch, but I haven’t seen it done this well. The site around it is nicely done as well.

Four clever ideas, well executed – great stuff.

Privacy in the Public Space

A couple of privacy-related stories popped up this week. Firstly, once again, a lawsuit against Facebook for privacy breaches was dismissed as being groundless, and a report was released in the US that found 45% of employers screen potential employees via social media.  It still amazes me how people still have the “Invisible in my car” mentality when using social media. Even though cars you’re perfectly visible to the outside world  in their car, they behave as if they are in public – picking noses, singing, putting on make up. And it’s the same on with social media – as private as it feels, it’s not. Sites’ number one concern is UBs, not making sure no one sees that photo of you drunk at Schoolie’s Week in 2001.

Interestingly, the reality of lives being increasingly led in public are the subject of a new documentary We Live In Public, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. The film, directed by Ondi Timoner (who also directed the cult classic Dig!) looks at the life and work of Josh Harris. Harris was a pioneer in the first dot com boom, launching pseudo.com, the first internet television network. He used his fortune on an event he called Quiet!We Live In Public. Part art installation and part social experiment, he gathered 100 artists in a Japanese pod hotel style building for 100 days, all of it on web cam.  Basically, he was commenting on how, as the internet made greater levels of connection possible, people would be increasingly willing to sacrifice, or rather redefine, their notions of privacy. It’s an observation which has proved to be very prescient.

What this probably all means is that we’re at the end of the anything goes era of social media. As a social media presence becomes an accepted part of everyone’s life, we’ll be forced to meet the same standards there as in the “real world”. Which also means there is potentially a commercial opportunity for someone who works out a way of keeping social media private, whether through paid subscriptions or comprehensive history kills.

Twitter in Pictures

Finally, a nice little infographic showing what the Twitter community would look like if it was 100 people – although I wonder what criteria they were using when they categorized other people’s tweets as “inane”, and how big the sample group was.

Shipping container houses are nothing new but came across this great example of shipping container architecture whilst browsing flickr. What a great use for a huge rubbish problem and, unlike other architectural applications of containers I have seen, this combines some nice contemporary design lines.

Economical way to build a pad too – you can pick up a huge shipping container from as little as $400 on ebay.

Other examples of shipping containers in architecure:

Shipping container funhouse Melbourne – Phooey Architects

Proposal for a shipping container development in NYC – LO-TEK Architects

Shipping Container House – Wellington NZ

Social Media fuel’s Audi’s pro-Diesel campaign

One of the ways the automotive industry has been combat the global downturn and concerns about climate change is with clean diesel. Diesel produced to new standards has a reduced sulfur output to, and still provides the greater miles per litre than petrol which it always has.

Now diesel is something of a hard sell. The market, especially in the USA, associates it with tractors, smelly fumes and soot. To combat these preconceptions, Audi USA have launched a campaign selling the message that “Diesel is no longer a dirty word” . As well as traditional advertising, they’ve launched this viral video on YouTube, and started a Facebook Cause, which sees them donate a dollar to carbon offsetting every time someone joins ($25,000 had been donated at time of writing). More innovative is the “conversation” about diesel they’ve  included on their site. Basically, this is an aggregator of diesel related activity on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr.

It’s a bold idea, but in practice the result is slightly odd, for the simple reason that so much content is being pulled in, with so little filtering, that the final offering is a bit hit and miss. The Twitter links, in particular, seem to be largely spam, and most of the “news” content is just links back to the same stories on the Audi site. As for the functionality, here’s a quick word of advice to every flash developer  – Having the sound of empty diesel barrels falling on top of each other from a great height come up unprompted on loading a page will never, ever be a good idea. Still, the concept is good and with a slightly more rigorous filtering process, a lot of the issues could have been fixed.

Side note: Before the “Diesel is not a dirty word” campaign,  Audi’s first move into establishing credibility for their diesel range was winning Le Mans with a diesel car.  That’s what you call having all your bases covered.

Colorsuckr doesn’t, err, suck

Colorsuckr is a great new tool we came across this week. It’s pretty simple – you just enter an image URL, and it gives you the color palette. All good. I just wish the URL didn’t sound like something I should be wiping from my browser history.

Your workspace as a blog

Finally, a web app which I’m completely torn about.  Even after thinking about it for a couple of days, I can’t decide whether Harvest Co-Op would a great new tool, an insidious tool of Big Brother or a waste of time. Basically, it’s an app in which you let your co-workers know what you’re working on, where you are, and so on – aggregrating the information we usually put into calenders, discuss at WIP meetings, and so on. On paper, great.  But for it to be effective, how much time would we have to spend updating it? Who would check if it was accurate.

Regardless of these questions, I am sure it would be really useful in some workplaces, and we will probably all be using tools like it in the not too distant future.

We currently have some fantastic career opportunites at igloo. In particular we are currently looking for a digital producer (or digital project manager or account manager – digital!) and a midweight graphic and web designer.

So whether you need work, may need work or you work, if you want to work at igloo, we would love to hear from you.

What many people are not aware is that FriendFeed have a very powerful and advanced real-time search feature that not many social media tools have, FriendFeed contains filtering search option for relevancy and popularity. Take Bing and Google for example, Bing is like a features enhanced version of Google and that’s exactly what FriendFeed is to Twitter.

While it is unlikely for Twitter users to migrate to FriendFeed immediately, (Twitter being FriendFeed’s competition) no doubt FriendFeed will appeal to the younger generation which is the below 18 group that is reported to diss Twitter. I suppose this particular age group will choose FriendFeed over Twitter because of the interlinked Facebook friend community element.

Although it is too early to predict what will become of this acquisition and no major changes has been made between the two, it is however wise to keep an eye out for this two in the near future as to what surprise may come along. As for now, I’ve got FFtogo (FriendFeed Mobile) to check out.

Picture Credit: Cnet News

Facebook Flourishes, Twitter Towers, MySpace melts

Some interesting trends are emerging in the world of social media. News Corp released it’s full year operation income this week, and particularly notable was that the “Other” segment, which accounts for  Fox Interactive Media, reported an operating loss of $363 million. This loss was largely driven by a drop of advertising revenue at MySpace, which FIM owns.

MySpace’s traffic numbers were overtaken by Facebook’s last May and Facebook has gone from strength to strength ever since – it’s now the world’s fourth most popular website, behind only the Google, Microsoft and Yahoo behemoths.  And it looks like even MySpace itself thinks the trend will continue, having recently cut two-thirds of their international staff and replaced their CEO.

But what does this mean? Well, as simply as possible, Facebook is getting it’s audience boost from MySpace refugees, who seem largely to be over 18s who prefer the functionality (particularly the privacy) of the Facebook experience. As well, Facebook is tapping into sections of the market, particularly 35-54 year olds who MySpace weren’t ever able to gain great traction with. MySpace continues to grow in popularity with teens and niche audiences, so it’s not in any danger of going under, but moving forward it won’t be able to compete with Facebook for a mass audience.

Over at Twitter, meanwhile, things continue to go from strength to strength – as this link shows the upward trend is spiking sharply (check international stats here).  But some interesting stats released by Nielsen show that this growth has been driven largely not by the traditional early up-takers, but the over 24s – in fact, remarkably. more people over 55 use Twitter than under 24.

And again, why? Well, it’s just a theory, but I would posit that it’s because Twitter is becoming more than more than just a social media site, in the traditional sense. MySpace and Facebook are about friends. Facebook is about maintaining existing relationships, which is why it is popular all age groups. MySpace focuses as much on meeting new friends as maintaining old relationships, which is why teens and young adults love it so much. But Twitter is more like a virtual town square, where people go to hear the latest news, get advice, find out what has been happening that day, and so on. Which is why it could end up the biggest of them all.

Finding Flickr Fotos Faster, Funner

Everyone’s favourite photo finding resource got a better this week, with a great new search functionality. It’s all explained in this post. No doubt this group of extremely keen University of Washington researchers, who used Flickr images to build Rome in a day would have found it handy.

Don’t Hit Refresh

The whole world is going digital. Later this year work will begin on Mahanakhon, which at 310 metres will be Bangkok’s tallest. But what makes it really noteworthy is that it will be pixelated. German architect Ole Scheeren of OMA, has designed it with indentations in its facade which will give it the appearance of having, or rather missing “pixels”. If all goes according to plan it will be finished in 2012. Incredible.

The New Twitter?

We’re going to start this week’s dump by jumping in a time machine and heading back, way back….. to 2007. At the indie rock festival SXSW in Austin, Texas, the phenomenon that is Twitter took its first steps towards internet domination. Through some cleverly placed TVs monitors placed at various venues, Twitter was able to engage the performers, speakers, bloggers and audience at the event. By the end of the event, Twitter’s audience had tripled, and the world begun to”get” micro-blogging.

Jump forward to this year’s SXSW, and once again, an at-first simple app captured the attention of the assembled hipsters – Foursquare. Foursquare is a location based service which allows users in certain towns (none in Australia yet) to recommend fun things to do, or discuss things they’d like to do, in effect providing users with a real time city guide, or an “urban mix tape” as they would have it, with lots of great tips and to-dos. Of course, it syncs with Facebook and Twitter, and makes most sense as an phone app. So far, so good, I hear you saying.

But what has made Foursquare really sticky is the game. By visiting different locations, reviewing them, and even just logging on, you are awarded points and badges. Get enough, and you become “mayor”. It’s simple, it seems to be great fun, and it’s driving traffic up fast. Watch this space, cause another huge trend could be coming from Texas.

Is this the end of photography?

At first glance, there’s nothing particularly amazing about the above McDonald’s ad. But, as the clip shows, this paean to two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickle on a sesame seed is completely CGI. The decision was made to film it like this cause it was quicker and easier – just amazing.

Crazy wedding dance shows YouTube’s money making capacity

By now you will all have seen the “JK Wedding Entrance Dance”, where an American Bridal Party get crazy to Chris Brown’s “Forever”. What sets this one apart is, as this fascinating post on Google’s blog shows, that it was a huge money spinner. As well as the posters benefitting from using YouTube’s new click to buy download tool, the clip saw “Forever”, released a year ago, get back to number 4 on the iTunes chart.

Industrial designers mike and maaike have taken a different spin on a concept car the ATNMBL (Autonomy with the Automobile). Rather than exploring the form and function and focusing on car performance, the designers have rethought the way a car could be used.

“Dismissing the need for extreme MPH and acceleration as irrelevant, ATNMBL proposes a new standard of performance: one of time-saving, quality of life, and increased exploration. Freed from the monotony of driving, we can enjoy quality time while in transit: socializing, gaming, movies, business, videocalls, web surfing, sleeping or discovering new places with powerful voice controlled search and navigation”

Check out the mini-site.